A Triangle Game: ISIS, Assad, and America

“Do you see yourself on the same page with the—with the Assad regime?” a reporter asked Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and General Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a press conference last week. She noted that the forces of the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, had been hitting the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, also known as ISIS, for some time and added, “Do you still believe that Assad is part of the problem, or he might become part of the broader solution in the region?”

HAGEL: “Well, Assad is very much a central part of the problem. And I think it’s well documented as to why. When you have the brutal dictatorship of Assad and what he has done to his own country, which perpetuated much of what is happening or has been happening in Syria, so he’s part of the problem, and as much a part of it as probably the central core of it.

“As to your question regarding ISIL and Assad, yes, they are fighting each other, as well as other terrorist groups, very sophisticated terrorist groups in—in Syria.”

DEMPSEY: “He is absolutely part of the problem.”

As Hagel and Dempsey suggest, saying that Assad is “part of the problem” more than three years into a war in which he has bombed his own country’s cities and attacked its civilians is an understatement. Syria’s civil war, which was set off by his regime’s suppression of a more political resistance, has killed close to two hundred thousand people, according to the latest United Nations estimate, created millions of refugees, and turned the country into a giant supply depot for regional disorder. This leaves the problem of how to navigate both our opposition to Assad and his conflict with ISIS. A season ago, the reporter’s question would have sounded absurd, and rightly so; this weekend, it’s been asked often.

So how does one proceed? The least useful way is to pretend that there is no dilemma, and that, whatever each might say, the interests of Assad and ISIS are aligned. The basis for this argument is that Assad has, in the course of the war, strategically picked his battles with various rebel factions, first going after the ones that he believed to be domestic political threats, which in turn allowed ISIS to grow stronger. (Another theory is that Assad wanted ISIS to be powerful because it made the opposition as a whole look bad.) But at best this is a short-term perspective. Assad and many in his circle are Alawites, whom ISIS regards as apostates; the group is a real threat to Assad and to his base. (Lawrence Wright has written about ISIS’s founding, which is rooted in violence toward non-Sunni branches of Islam.) And, as the Wall Street Journal and Times noted this weekend, Assad’s forces have recently shifted their focus more toward ISIS, with, for example, air strikes on Raqqa, a stronghold that the United States may soon target. To treat ISIS and Assad as a single, two-faced creature is to go into this fight blindly.

The cast of characters is complicated—there are also the “other terrorist groups, very sophisticated terrorist groups” that Hagel mentioned. This weekend, days after ISIS put out a video of the murder of James Foley, an American journalist, Jabhat al-Nusra, another group trying to overthrow Assad, released the American journalist Peter Theo Curtis. The Qatari government said that it had talked al-Nusra into letting Curtis go without ransom, for “humanitarian” reasons. (That seems unlikely.) Al-Nusra is a rival of ISIS; it is also Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, and it should be blindingly obvious that no good can come of strengthening it. Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your enemy.

A simple rule to start with: we need to be careful when handing out guns in Syria. There hasn’t been enough care taken so far, particularly on the part of the Gulf States, and that has been a key reason for ISIS’s rise. The group took weapons and aid directly from donors in places like Qatar and Saudi Arabia; it also scooped up the arsenals of other factions (and, in some cases, their hostages). ISIS has drawn in many of the regime’s Sunni opponents. While some of the more moderate factions that had a presence early on have been defeated, by the government or by ISIS, and some are still fighting, others have been absorbed. President Obama’s critics—Hillary Clinton, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg; John McCain, pretty much constantly—have argued that the entire ISIS disaster could have been avoided if we’d only done more to arm the rebels, at least those in groups like the Free Syrian Army. Clinton called the President’s decision not to do so on a large scale “a failure” that left “a vacuum” for the jihadists. Obama, in an interview with Tom Friedman, said that has “always been a fantasy,” because not only were there never enough moderates but also because many of them were “doctors, farmers, pharmacists, and so forth”—not the sorts of people to whom you can just hand heavy weaponry and hope for the best. Indeed, they were the sorts of people whose weapons were looted by groups like ISIS.

How could simply siphoning more weapons into the country have helped? Hillary Clinton has an answer to that, and it’s a fairly telling one. The arming of Syrian factions by other countries, she acknowledged, was “indiscriminate”; the best way to control that, she says, would be to have “skin in the game”—to be seen as a weapons supplier, too. In her memoir, “Hard Choices,” Clinton wrote more about what she again called “into the game”:

It wasn’t a secret that various Arab states and individuals were sending arms into Syria. But the flow of weapons was poorly coordinated, with different countries sponsoring different and sometimes competing armed groups. And a troubling amount of that material was finding its way to extremists. Because the United States was not part of this effort, we had less leverage to corral and coördinate the arms traffic.

In other words, if the U.S. were a major supplier of arms, we would better be able to tell the other suppliers of arms whom to deal with. We’d put our guns on the barroom table and hope that they were impressed. But America’s only strategy can’t be to hope that we look tough enough to persuade extremists to let us take the lead. In their press conference, Hagel and Dempsey said that all options were being considered; the White House has made it clear that this includes air strikes against ISIS positions in Syria. When Dempsey was asked whether he thought that ISIS could ever be defeated without being dealt with in Syria, he said no, though it could be “contained” for a while. But he also said, “ISIS will only truly be defeated when it’s rejected by the twenty million disenfranchised Sunni that happen to reside between Damascus and Baghdad.”

“And that requires air strikes?” a reporter asked.

“It requires a variety of instruments, only one small part of which is airstrikes”—which, Dempsey hastened to say, he was not necessarily predicting. “But it requires the application of all of the tools of national power—diplomatic, economic, information, military.” The general, more than some politicians, was presenting a political problem, one that could not simply be solved by a loud display. It’s a reminder that, before we go to war, it would at least be good to be clear about who is who in Syria, and what everyone’s interests are.

Amy Davidson Sorkin, a New Yorker staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.